Well, computers can't really think, they don't emote, they don't understand poetry, we don't really understand how they work. So what? Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do, so now's the time to start thinking about how we're going to adjust our social structures and economic structures to be aware of this new reality.
Showing posts with label trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trends. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2015
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms
This is about how the current educational delivery approach, which has been used in education since the industrial revolution, is failing students, in this, the most exciting and dynamic time in human history.
Ken Robinson clearly identifies how the currently used old world model fails to solve the problems of the current and future world.
The MUST watch video.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Assessing Creativity in Today’s Classroom
http://edex.adobe.com/professional-development/workshop/creativity-assess/
Creativity — it’s our future.
Essential Question:
How can assessment foster student creativity?
What is creativity, and why is it vital for success in school and beyond?
Essential Question:
How can assessment foster student creativity?
What is creativity, and why is it vital for success in school and beyond?
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Back to the Basics.Online or Not Online...
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Technology-Will-Never-Fix/230185/
"How many of you have ever tried to take a free course on the Internet?"
Over half the class raised their hands.
"And how many completed it?"
All the hands went down.
Monday, April 20, 2015
A Conversation with Bill Gates: Considering the Future of Higher Education
What is the future of education?
Thursday, March 26, 2015
What Are My Needs As An English Language Teacher?
| Students guided through learning module that asks and collects questions. | ||
| Instructor prepares lecture. | Instructor prepares learning opportunities. | |
| Beginning of Class | Students have limited information about what to expect. | Students have specific questions in mind to guide their learning. |
| Instructor makes general assumption about what is helpful. | Instructor can anticipate where students need the most help. | |
| During Class | Students try to follow along. | Students practice performing the skills they are expected to learn. |
| Instructor tries to get through all the material. | Instructor guides the process with feedback and mini-lectures. | |
| After Class | Students attempt the homework, usually with delayed feedback. | Students continue applying their knowledge skills after clarificationa and feedback. |
| Instructor grades past work. | Instructor posts any additional explanations and resources as necessary and grades higher quality work. | |
| Office Hours | Students want confirmation about what to study. | Students are equipped to seek help where they know they need it. |
| Instructor often repeats what was in lecture. | Instructor continues guiding students toward deeper understanding. |
http://ctl.utexas.edu/teaching/flipping-a-class/different
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Spring Blog Festival 2015
Spring Blog Festival (SBF) is a one day event that will take place on Saturday March 21, 2015. The aim of the festival is to showcase bloggers and their work. The links to the webinars and content of the presentations will be available in the courseware.
Topics range from transformational blogging and reflective blogging to connectivity, history, evolution, teaching tools, multi-media, thinking & creativity, families, schools, and content curation.
Presentations of the Spring Blog Festival
Topics range from transformational blogging and reflective blogging to connectivity, history, evolution, teaching tools, multi-media, thinking & creativity, families, schools, and content curation.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
About Active Learning
What is active learning?
- Active learning is "anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing" (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, p. 2).
- Felder & Brent (2009) define active learning as "anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do other than simply watching, listening and taking notes" (p. 2).
- Active learning strategies can be as short as a few minutes long.
- Active learning techniques can be integrated into a lecture or any other classroom setting relatively easily. Even large classrooms can involve learning activities beyond the traditional lecture format.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Teaching in the 21st Century
I cannot comprehend questions like "Should I rent or buy?" or "Which credit card is the best for me?" if I have no knowledge of the basic facts of mathematics (ie. addition, multiplication, percentages, interest rates). How can you ask a student to find out the number of grains of sand on an average beach? Open-ended questions like this seem wonderful to ask, but create anxiety in our students since they usually aren't given the proper tools to answer the question and their short-term memories cannot hold all of the relevant information.
I do think that modelling appropriate behaviour and teaching certain skills is OK to do, but NOT as a substitution of basic facts and working knowledge. The more a student can commit to long-term memory, the more we empower our students to be able to answer the difficult questions they will face later in life.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Education Online The Latest State of Research
There are both pros and cons of online education.
Online learning should be seen as a complement and extension of classical forms of learning. Not even the best online course can fully replace the personal contact with a teacher, or the human relationships that develop in a group.
All in all, traditional classes should not be replaced with online learning.
Friday, January 30, 2015
eBook News
I've always felt that anything that attracts kids to reading it a good thing. From getting them to read books about movies that th...
Do you use eBooks?
Are you for paper books or eBooks?
What is the future of reading books?
Although the want for e-book services in libraries has grown, and so the number of people with e-readers, some difficulties still keep libraries from being able to provide the popular technology. Just recently have most big publishers agreed to sell e-books to libraries for public use. It has taken many years but publishers of electronic books now realize that libraries providing an e-book to patrons can be a huge opportunity for advertising and usually results in patrons becoming customers.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Science of Learning
This is an excellent presentation
The mission of the newly formed Science
of Learning Institute is to understand the most essential part of our
human capital: the ability to learn. The Institute supports research and
application that seeks to understand learning at all levels of
scientific inquiry—including how the brain changes through learning, how
development and aging affects our ability to learn, how neurological
and psychiatric diseases disrupt or change learning, and why there are
such vast individual differences that naturally occur among learners. A
central part of the mission is to understand how new technologies such
as machine learning and new educational programs can optimize
learning—whether it occurs in the informal setting of the playground,
the more formal setting of a school, a rehabilitation program, or
on-the-job training.
Monday, January 19, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Opening Meeting Class on WizIQ
The first class on the 17th of January 2015 is about meeting and getting to know each other.
The main topic is covering a short introduction to the values of being fluent in English as well as how not to
learn foreign languages to escape from widespread learning mistakes.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Dave Dodgson: A year in review. Three Quick Ideas to Start your 2015 Classes | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC
Idea 1 - R&R: Reflections and Resolutions
An obvious angle to go for at the start of the New Year is Resolutions. However, this lesson can often have the same problems as resolutions themselves – generic, hollow, and something that is quickly abandoned or forgotten.
However, a couple of years ago while focusing on reflective practice during my MA course, I decided to apply some of the principles of teacher reflection to a New Year’s lesson for my students and the results were much better and it has now become a recurring feature of my late December/early January teaching.
- First of all, I ask students to think about everything they did, were a part of, or witnessed in the year just gone. Their first task is to identify and list the three best things from the year. This is done as a silent individual activity with plenty of thinking time – it’s often harder for people to remember the good things than the bad!
- Next, the students pair up to compare their personal ‘best of’ lists with plenty of questions encouraged.
- To complete the T-P-S (Think-Pair-Share) cycle, each student shares what their partner told them with the rest of the class.
- Now time to focus on the things that could have gone better. Again, students get thinking time to consider what didn’t work out so well (whether through their own involvement or something beyond their control) but they must also identify why these events could have been better. I generally tell them to stick to one or two things so the overall tone of the lesson remains positive.
- Steps 2 and 3 are repeated as the students compare and discuss with a partner before sharing with the class.
- And now for the resolution part. Focusing on those things that could have been better, the students must decide what they can personally do in the New Year to address these shortcomings, solve these problems, or make these improvements. Their goal in this stage is to write out two specific and focused resolutions (with help from the teacher to modify and reformulate when necessary).
- These can then be shared either orally or through Post-Its on the wall or a class blog if you are into that kind of thing. Don’t forget that students will appreciate their teacher taking part in this process too!
Idea 2 - The best (and worst) of 2014
This is a more recent idea that I have used in the last couple of years as part of my game-based learning classes but it could just as easily be done with films, TV shows, music, or books if your students are not gamers.
Depending on what your class are interested in, before the lesson you should pick out one of the many ‘best of’ lists that circulate on websites and in the wider media at this time of year*. Try to keep it short – a top 5 is enough and it shouldn’t be more than a top 10. For low level classes, a simple list will do. Higher levels might be willing to get to grips with the write-ups that accompany the picks as well.
*There is an alternative to this, which is presented below.
The rest of this brief write-up will use games as an example but the principles are the same whatever media you choose.
- Start with a discussion question: What new games did you buy/play this year? Again, give some thinking time before asking the students to compare their ideas in pairs and groups. In the whole class discussion, direct the class to identify which games they enjoyed and which ones were disappointing (it might be a good idea to get some of the titles up on the board).
- Present each pair/group with the list you picked out before the lesson. Tell them which website/media source it is from and stress that it is just an opinion. Ask them to read through the choices and discuss whether or not they agree.
- Task each group with drawing up their own ‘best of’ list for the previous year. How they do so is up to them – they might try to reach a group consensus, they could each choose one or two titles to go on a list, or they could vote. They must be ready to explain their choices to the rest of the class afterwards.
- Higher level students could be asked to prepare an article introducing each game and explaining why it was chosen.
- At the end of the lesson, students can refer back to the games from the past year they didn’t like and make an alternative list of ‘the worst games of 2014’. If you have time, you could present them with another article to kick-start the activity (plenty of the same websites that present ‘best of’ lists also have ‘worst of’ round-ups).
*As an alternative, you could not pick out a list for students to look at before the lesson and instead ask each group to search online for a list of the ‘best games of 2014’ and present it to the class This is a nice way to hand control over to the students.
Idea 3 – Word of the Year
This is a new one I tried out just before Christmas when I read a news story that the ‘word of the year’ for 2014 (as chosen by the Oxford Dictionary of English) was ‘vape’ (as in the action of using e-cigarettes). This is a rough outline of how I did the lesson:
- Write the word ‘vape’ on the board and ask if anyone knows what it means. If they don’t (my students didn’t), ask them to first guess and then look it up (they will need to look it up online to find the meaning). If they do, great! Ask the person who knows to explain what it means and go to the next step.
- Ask the students if they can work out why you presented them with this word (if they had to look it up online in step 1, they may have found the answer while searching; if they already knew, they may have to get searching now). Invite discussion as to why this was chosen as the word of the year.
- Discuss with students how new words enter languages, especially their own native languages. Is it through common use? Featuring in a dictionary? Through an official establishment? (As many of my students are French speakers, we had an interesting discussion about the Académie Française and I also told them about the Turkish equivalent, the Türk Dil Kurumu).
- Get the students to research previous ‘words of the year’ (they may also find an American version, which makes for interesting comparison). Did they know any of these words already? Which ones did they find the most interesting/bizarre? Why do they think these words were chosen? (One interesting trend my students spotted were the number of words relating to economic problems like squeezed middle and credit crunch, as well as the environmentally themed words like carbon footprint and social media related phrases like selfie, which they felt reflected our times).
- Make a prediction – what words have been circulating in the media recently and could be the word of 2015?
Teaching with Technology
Teachers will Learn to Blend and Flip your Classes with Technology. The course is available from January 5 – December 4, 2015.
The course offers new, veteran, and future teachers theoretical and practical knowledge on how to teach and learn using technology. The topics of the course will focus on applying the science of learning, ways to transform teachers, promote a learning partnership with students, will how to set up team and motivate students to become lifelong learners, and finally to teach small chunks in a live online class or micro teaching in pairs. Teachers will develop a philosophy of education statement and learn how to share it with the world.
Link to enrol: https://www.wiziq.com/course/92339-teaching-with-technology
By Dr. Nellie Deutsch
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Sheryl Crow & Eric Clapton @ A Very Special Christmas Live ("Merry Chris...
Merry Christmas, baby
You sure did treat me nice
Merry Christmas pretty, baby
You sure did treat me nice
Gave me a diamond ring
For Christmas
Now I'm living in paradise
Well, I'm feeling mighty fine
Got good music on my radio
Well, I'm feeling mighty fine
Got good music on my radio
Well
I would have kissed you, baby
While you're standing
Beneath the mistletoe
Well, alright
Ain't that the truth now
Santa came down the chimney
About a half past three
He brought
These pretty presents
That you see before me
Merry Christmas, baby
You sure been good to me
I haven't had
A toddy this morning
But I'm all lit up
Like a Christmas tree
Well, I wanna
Wanna bring
It a little bit high
Well, I
Well I wanna bring
It a little bit high
Oh, I wanna bring
It a little bit high, baby
No, wanna bring
It a little high, baby
Little high
Haven't had
A toddy this morning
But I'm all lit up
But I'm all lit up
But I'm all lit up
But I'm all lit up
Said I'm all lit up
I'm all lit up, baby
Merry Christmas, baby
Merry, merry, merry, merry
Merry Christmas, baby
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)